Source

Robert Kim (private photograph)

Description

Billboard for Peresvet Trading Firm in Moscow, playing off of an existing Soviet billboard just above it

Era

Post-Soviet

Date

1993

Annotation

Throughout the 1990s, quite a lot of post-Soviet public space, particularly in Moscow, was dominated by various Imperial retro projects. Russia’s pre-Soviet era seemed to many people as a useful tool for making sense of the dismissal of the Soviet past. Many Soviet monuments, buildings and street names were not only removed, but often replaced with more “authentic” Imperial retro projects, such as the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in the middle of Moscow. The billboard for the Peresvet Trading Firm on Dobryninskaya Ploshchad’ in 1993 went a different way, preserving the Soviet message above and positing its own message as a retort.
The retort works on several levels. For one, it highlights the uselessness of ossified Soviet utopianism. Quite clearly, the project of “building communism” was never completed and had no future. In contrast, the project of “building a new Russia” sounds like a more attainable possibility, and what makes it more attainable is the fact that this “new Russia” looks a bit like the old one– hence the Church Slavonic styling of the font, as well as the pre-reform Imperial orthography. For another, Peresvet ties itself very closely to the Yeltsinist messaging in 1993. At this time, the presidency and the Congress of People’s Deputies were locked in a power conflict. Yeltsin’s message in this conflict was that the Congress represented the Soviet past, whereas the presidency represented surging ahead towards a post-Soviet future. “We are building a new Russia” was the Yeltsin team’s slogan during the April 25, 1993 referendum, which he more or less won against the Congress (though not decisively– see Artifact #00039). Peresvet simply appropriated Yeltsin’s slogan for itself, and in that way made its own business dealings– and by extension post-Soviet capitalism– seem historically legitimate. Of course, this grandiosity was itself necessary for firms like Peresvet, because the nature of their business dealings in the 1990s was suspect at best. Though the word “Peresvet” was subsequently used by several successful businesses and banks, this particular outfit seems to have existed for about a year and has no relation to its namesakes, and its contribution to the building of a new Russia consisted of bartering cars for leather jackets in China.

Geography: Place Of Focus

Moscow

Bibliographic Reference

Billboard, Peresvet, 1993